Mark Zieman is editor and vice president of The Kansas City (Mo.) Star and writes a regular column for The American Editor. Reach him at zieman@kcstar.com.

YEARS AGO I LEARNED AN AWFUL TRUTH about my journalism skills: I can’t sell newspapers.

I don’t mean literally, although that’s also true. Once, senior Kansas City Star executives challenged our circulation canvassers to a sales contest. We were convinced that our passion and expertise could trump their generic pitch, which I believed relied too heavily on touting our advertising coupons and NFL Chiefs coverage. The result? Our passion and expertise generated two sales. Their pitch: 42. And we even worked the same neighborhood.

But what really pained me was my inability to sell papers through content. I was dismayed to learn that a series we had invested two years in, which had won the Pulitzer Prize, generated no extra copies the week it ran. In fact, circulation went down.

I sought confirmation. So I set off on a six-month sabbatical, wandering our circulation department like Diogenes, searching for any honest connection between what we printed in the newspaper and subsequent circulation growth. In the end, I only confirmed what most editors already know: Only major news events and tragedies, such as the death of Princess Diana or 9/11, are guaranteed to drive sales. Or put another way, in the print newspaper business, our best days are almost always unplanned.

Thank God for online.

If your paper is anything like ours, most of your Web traffic is driven by content your newsroom generates. And guess what? Add more content and readership grows. Add video and readers will stay on your site longer. Encourage readers to submit their own content or comment on your stories, and watch page views multiply.

With the Web, editors are firmly in control. What you do online matters – and best of all — you can measure it. With proof of your success you can then build an argument to protect your newsroom resources, even during this industry slump. It’s a beautiful thing. Every day I study my Omniture dashboard and look for patterns in the ClickMap overlays, like the omnipotent director played by Ed Harris in “The Truman Show,” waiting for the moment to yell “Cue the sun!”

We created a crime blog, which now generates a decent portion of our total Web traffic by itself. So we launched more blogs. Our photographers learned to shoot video, which last month generated nearly 500,000 hits and also video ad sales – revenue once reserved for our TV competitors. Most of all we’ve packed our site with breaking news stories and photos, and then piled on even more – 106 percent more than last year through June – which has increased total readership of our site 34 percent during the same time.

The Web is an optimistic story for our beleaguered journalists. Many of us now have more local readers, in print and online, than in the history of our newspapers. And most promising of all, we can still do better: For instance, the Star’s Web site, KansasCity.com, resembles a slightly organized train wreck, in desperate need of a redesign. Greater days are ahead of us.

Consider The Wichita (Kan.) Eagle, our sister paper to the southwest. When the F5 tornado destroyed Greensburg, Kan., in May, Wichita blanketed their Web site with coverage. We know big stories drive print readership, and that’s true online. But the Web offers more tools to leverage those stories into really stunning readership gains.

The printed Eagle saw a slight spike in single copy sales on the weekend of the tornado, with overall circulation flat for the month. But by saturating its Web site with hundreds of photos and unique online content, Wichita watched page views on Kansas.com soar 800 percent in May, and online visitors spike 600 percent from a month earlier, a surge of more than 3 million new readers.

But to manage this growth successfully, you must be able to measure it. At the Star, we set online traffic goals for everything from blogs to click throughs on our newsletters to how much traffic we generate from user-generated content. We review and update those goals constantly. Our newsroom managers have a basic knowledge of online readership and business strategies, including a general idea of how much revenue is driven by the traffic our journalists create.

It’s a sizeable dollar figure and growing – just the kind of compelling message you like to share with your publisher during budget time. And it beats the heck out of selling papers. *